Lowra Bruni

Lowra Bruni Gallery

Lowra was a raven-aired beauty of Italian extraction. She was born in Rome but, thankfully for us, was dragged to England by her parents. She ended up as a housewife in Brighton, where she enjoyed cycling, horse-riding, swimming, water-skiing and skin diving – so she was as athletic as her good friend Ingrid Norsman, with whom she appeared in duo shoots.

She preferred sheer stockings to stretch tights but was seen with Ingrid wearing both. There is a stunning set in Spick & Span Extra 44 that is worthy of some comment. Actually, more of an historical aside and a meander down memory lane with the author.

That magazine was published in the Autumn of 1972, only five years or so after the appearance of Mary Quant’s miniskirt, which necessitated the invention of tights; without them every girl in the UK at that time was an unpaid Spick and Span model. Believe me. There was a wonderful interim period when skirts were getting shorter almost by the day, but girls were still wearing stockings and suspenders. I used to ride the Circle Line of London’s underground for hours – it was a living, breathing ToCo mag with an infinite number of pages. Sorry, got quite carried away there. So, when tights arrived, girls got dressed in the same order they always had – suspender belt, stockings, knickers. So they ended up wearing their knickers over their tights – just as Lowra and Ingrid do in that set. Not quite sure when that changed, but I still find the old order much more erotic.

Anyway, both Lowra and Ingrid seemed to delight in displaying both their tights and stockings to our eager eyes, trying to pretend they loved twanging a girl’s suspenders almost as much as we did.